Saturday, April 06, 2013

Movement to limit gay freedoms

I don’t think we’ve paused sufficiently to celebrate the wonderful recent defeat for the cause of personal freedom. After all, these sorts of defeats don’t happen every day.

Over the past 40 years, personal freedom has been on a nearly uninterrupted winning streak. In the 1960s, we saw a great expansion of social and lifestyle freedom.

So what is he talking about? Several paragraphs later, he explains his point:

But last week saw a setback for the forces of maximum freedom. A representative of millions of gays and lesbians went to the Supreme Court and asked the court to help put limits on their own freedom of choice. They asked for marriage.

Marriage is one of those institutions — along with religion and military service — that restricts freedom. Marriage is about making a commitment that binds you for decades to come. It narrows your options on how you will spend your time, money and attention.

Whether they understood it or not, the gays and lesbians represented at the court committed themselves to a certain agenda. They committed themselves to an institution that involves surrendering autonomy. They committed themselves to the idea that these self-restrictions should be reinforced by the state. They committed themselves to the idea that lifestyle choices are not just private affairs but work better when they are embedded in law.

No, the LGBTQIA agenda does not include decades of commitment or loss of sexual freedom. Those aspects of marriage have already been abolished. We have so-called no-fault divorce, where either spouse can get a divorce at any time for any reason. We have also abolished laws against adultery.

What we have had, since the 1960s, is the dramatic rise of the family courts and their infringement of the freedoms of parents, whether they are married or not. Brooks and his allies seem completely blind to this.

I suspect that this shift in public acceptance will be permanent, unless it turns out that marriages are more unstable when two people of the same gender are involved.

More unstable? Of course those marriages will turn out to be more unstable. But that will not matter.

With two same-sex marriage cases before the Supreme Court, numerous commentators have latched on to remarks by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg critical of the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide. It is not the judgment that was wrong, but “it moved too far, too fast,” she said at Columbia Law School last year, a view she has expressed in various speeches and law review articles.

That's right, and the court will never have broad respect until it admits its error.